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Bureau of Meteorology's new boss asked to examine $96M bill for website redesign

abc.net.au

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Re: Bureau of Meteorology's new boss asked to examine $96M bill for website redesign

#21

Post by mrtksn »

TrackerFF wrote: post #5

Hopefully they'll go through all billed invoices with a microscope. My guess is that this will reveal outright fraud from the consulting firm(s), in the form of overbilling in hours. Even if they bill $500/hr, and they billed 24 hours a day, that would come out to $4.38m / year for each consultant. That's a 11 member team billing 24 hours a day, all year round, for two years straight. And if they billed more realisti…

See, usually you don't have 11 developers coding 24/7. What you usually have is project managers, account managers etc and then a few people who code every now and then. Then you have licenses and support costs.

You can't just code the website, zip the code and mail it to the client. They have many stakeholders like this person needs to be able to show this that persin needs to be able to access this etc because they are running a business or service with than many people. Then you will have requirements like blind people should be able to use that and someone should be able to monitor all that. For each complication you will use specialized tools and do integration, i.e. Adobe will sell you one thing Oracle will sell you another thing and you will have to have people overseeing all these integrations and requirements etc.

That's why you have thousands of employees in tech companies with seemingly a simple product that you can fully code in a week(at least the user facing part of it).

Re: Bureau of Meteorology's new boss asked to examine $96M bill for website redesign

#22

Post by cracki »

aurareturn wrote: post #17

Honestly, with an LLM, I can do it by myself for $96,000 - maybe less. I had a brief look at the website. Downvote me if you want. But I just built a small business website for a relative in about 5 minutes using Vercel's v0. All I did was upload the logo design, gave it some details about the business and it spit out a fantastic professional looking website in about 1 minute. Made some changes to it and pressed a bu…

Fixed price? Shake on it LOL

- That "weather website" has to serve all of Australia.

- It's got to be usable on big screen desktops, tablets, smartphones.

- It has to have an uptime of what I estimate to be 99.99%. As the article says, farmers will pitchfork you if you can't tell them when rain will hit their fields.

- It has to be slinging dynamic image data to (about) every visitor.

- The data comes from somewhere. You're lucky if they have that under control already. Probably not.

I came up with these aspects, not knowing anything about what the "Bureau of Meteorology" actually needs in a website. It's just common sense speculation.

Re: Bureau of Meteorology's new boss asked to examine $96M bill for website redesign

#23

Post by stephen_g »

fergie wrote: post #15

> "It is unbelievable a private consultancy was paid $78 million to redesign the website," Mr Littleproud said. This is the crux of the issue. If you have outsourced software engineering competency, yet one of your core missions is maintaining a large pile of software, then this is the inevitable result.

Of course one really ‘unbelievable’ thing is that this infrastructure upgrade contract (including the website) was actually initiated and approved by the previous Government (since voted out to opposition) that Littleproud was part of back in 2017…

Re: Bureau of Meteorology's new boss asked to examine $96M bill for website redesign

#24

Post by Lalabadie »

aurareturn wrote: post #17

Honestly, with an LLM, I can do it by myself for $96,000 - maybe less. I had a brief look at the website. Downvote me if you want. But I just built a small business website for a relative in about 5 minutes using Vercel's v0. All I did was upload the logo design, gave it some details about the business and it spit out a fantastic professional looking website in about 1 minute. Made some changes to it and pressed a bu…

The Australian government eagerly awaits your expert advice.

Re: Bureau of Meteorology's new boss asked to examine $96M bill for website redesign

#25

Post by stephen_g »

aurareturn wrote: post #17

Honestly, with an LLM, I can do it by myself for $96,000 - maybe less. I had a brief look at the website. Downvote me if you want. But I just built a small business website for a relative in about 5 minutes using Vercel's v0. All I did was upload the logo design, gave it some details about the business and it spit out a fantastic professional looking website in about 1 minute. Made some changes to it and pressed a bu…

People rely on this for safety as well as economic activity like agriculture etc.. As bad as the site redesign is, we even more don’t want a crappy vibe-coded site when incorrect weather warnings could kill a lot of people or cause economic damage!

Re: Bureau of Meteorology's new boss asked to examine $96M bill for website redesign

#26

Post by gk1 »

pu_pe wrote: post #19
TrackerFF wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just a hypothetical. If you have a team of 11 devs billing $500 / hour, every hour of the day, all year round, that comes out to a hair over $48 million a year. Do that for two years, and you have the $96.5m bill. Not necessarily rooted in reality.

Ok, here is another realistic hypothetical: a team of 10 devs billing $500/hour, plus extra "package" fees for subject matter expert review, machine learning experts advice, senior partner reviews, focus group experiments, A/B test monitoring, regulatory compliance lawyers, all coming at extra cost. You will find that they can milk that cow legally in much more imaginative ways than your calculation.

Exactly this. At least in the US, consultancies that contract with the gov’t can keep a small full time staff in order to qualify for small-business preference and keep their overhead low, and then depend on an army of subcontractors for large projects.

Re: Bureau of Meteorology's new boss asked to examine $96M bill for website redesign

#27

Post by gritten »

Lalabadie wrote: post #24
aurareturn wrote: post #17

Honestly, with an LLM, I can do it by myself for $96,000 - maybe less. I had a brief look at the website. Downvote me if you want. But I just built a small business website for a relative in about 5 minutes using Vercel's v0. All I did was upload the logo design, gave it some details about the business and it spit out a fantastic professional looking website in about 1 minute. Made some changes to it and pressed a bu…

The Australian government eagerly awaits your expert advice.

[flagged]

Re: Bureau of Meteorology's new boss asked to examine $96M bill for website redesign

#28

Post by TYPE_FASTER »

aleph_minus_one wrote: post #16
TrackerFF wrote: post #5

Hopefully they'll go through all billed invoices with a microscope. My guess is that this will reveal outright fraud from the consulting firm(s), in the form of overbilling in hours. Even if they bill $500/hr, and they billed 24 hours a day, that would come out to $4.38m / year for each consultant. That's a 11 member team billing 24 hours a day, all year round, for two years straight. And if they billed more realisti…

I doubt that the consulting firm seriously overbilled. To my knowledge rather consulting firms are great at selling the necessity of lots of consultants or consultant days: Just let the customer talk very openly about their wishes for the project, and you immediately get an insane scope explosion for the project, i.e. it "needs" an insane amount of consultants over many years to implement all these wishes. To increas…

> To my knowledge rather consulting firms are great at selling the necessity of lots of consultants consultant days: Just let the customer talk very openly about their wishes for the project, and you immediately get an insane scope explosion for the project, i.e. it "needs" an insane amount of consultants over many years to implement all these wishes.

"Oh yeah, we can do that!" Boom, there's a team...somewhere...working on it. It's a line on an on-site project manager's status report.

Re: Bureau of Meteorology's new boss asked to examine $96M bill for website redesign

#29

Post by tantalor »

> complete rebuild was necessary to ensure the website meets modern security... requirements

> launch and security testing cost $12.6 million

What are the challenging security concerns for a weather website? And why would testing alone cost $10+ million?

Re: Bureau of Meteorology's new boss asked to examine $96M bill for website redesign

#30

Post by datadrivenangel »

TrackerFF wrote: post #5

Hopefully they'll go through all billed invoices with a microscope. My guess is that this will reveal outright fraud from the consulting firm(s), in the form of overbilling in hours. Even if they bill $500/hr, and they billed 24 hours a day, that would come out to $4.38m / year for each consultant. That's a 11 member team billing 24 hours a day, all year round, for two years straight. And if they billed more realisti…

AT $250 an hour and 8 hours per day / 2000 hours per year, that's almost ~50 people years, which likely means a team of 10-12 devs working on it over 18 months with another 1-3 design and product and project people in the way making things look good until the bill arrived. Accenture is good at that. [0]

0 - https://australiatimes.com/australia-s-bureau-of-meteorology...

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